Kickstarter is becoming a fertile ground for remakes of old games

Those who fondly remember decade-old titles ante up to fund new versions.

Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter have been a powerful force in connecting innovative and risky new ideas with the backing that traditional sources of capital may not be willing to offer. But there's a second front to this battle, promising the rejuvenation of franchises that awaken longing pangs of nostalgia among the faithful.

Perhaps it's not surprising to hear that this has been particularly apparent among gamers. Building on the notorious success of Tim Schafer's Double Fine Adventure project, a wave of developers from famous series have followed suit and proposed fresh sequels, funded preemptively by the demand of fans.

UK studio Stainless Games was the team responsible for creating Carmageddon back in 1997. After stirring up a not inconsiderable amount of controversy with its mechanic of knocking down humans, the series bowed out in 2001, having been ported to almost all console platforms of the day.

At least until May of this year, when the original founders managed to wrestle the rights to the brand back from its previous publisher to launch a Kickstarter project to remake the original. It went on to exceed its original $400,000 goal and bring in $600,000 (actually not a huge amount in the world of game development).

In similar fashion, another late millennium title, Total Annihilation, which focused on real-time strategy on a phenomenal scale, has gone years without any update to the series while the genre becomes ever more focused on smaller strategic teams of units. Planetary Annihilation hopes to solve that.

This pattern raises an interesting situation for licensing issues. The video gaming industry is so young that its most recognizable titles won't approach the end of their copyright period for decades yet. But the resurgence of these projects shows the esteem that can be built into such projects even before development if they manage to obtain the recognition. It will be interesting to see if this comes up more and more with digital properties further down the line.

Even outside remakes of the games themselves, it's clear from ancillary projects like this history of Sensible Software that an audience who grew up with these trivialities is now more than keen to spend some money on reliving fondly remembered experiences.

Who knows if the games will be any good? Perhaps we're counting on these first few examples to blossom into the potential that many hope they have. Ultimately, that could be a deciding factor as to whether fans continue to support such projects or decide that their memories are best left in the past with rose-tinted edges.

The guys behind the Pro Pinball series just started a Kickstarter campaign to remaster the original tables and create a new one. These are still the best pinball sims ever made despite dating back to the mid-90's. They have a pretty lofty goal and as much as I'd like to see it succeed, I must admit I'm skeptical that they will. $400k is quite a sum. I'm backing it nonetheless.Pro Pinball®: Revived & Remastered

This game was hilarious. first time I saw it I could not stop belly laughing helplessly. My friends thought I was being weird... but it was just too... AWESOME.

Another game that needs a remake: Outcast! Underrated and unremembered game that was better than Half-Life 1 and many contemporary games in so many ways. Very technically advanced and the graphics and music were awesome, as was the interactivity and explorability of the world. And voxels!!

Ofcourse...Yves Grolet has not had much output since Outcast for some reason. It makes me think the guy was a one hit wonder. I was really sad when Outcast 2 was cancelled.

Yar... How about with something like Sony Move acting like a 3D "mouse"? Or maybe multi-touch control on the Wii-U? PC is best in terms of RAM and CPU, and I bet a modern Homeworld would be very RAM intensive, but it doesn't that the input devices to make volumetric strategy really shine, perhaps?

It seem to be bringing back Turn based games as well, wasteland2 & deadstate both would probably not exist as proects in the works towards eventual release without it snce they both got their start there. I think the upcoming xcom enemy unknown after god knows how many attempts to "modernize" an incredible game into crappy flight sims, third & first person shooters, and real time strategy games that all completely missed what made the original game such a winner.

Unreal 1 remake! with the original music composer, and keeping the Nali and excorcizing the beef-head wrestler goons that pass for characters in modern Epic games.

^ Also this. The original Unreal is still on of my favorite FPS games. The 8-ball was a killer weapon. The outdoor areas were incredible for their time. So much fun!

It's not much, but this D3D 10 renderer should allow you to see Unreal on a modern OS with modern-ish rendering. Obviously it doesn't update the assets, but it might tide us all over until some sort of new Unreal game comes out.

I find it curious that Max Tatton-Brown implies that today's copyrights will eventually expire, despite all evidence to the contrary. What news does this guy read that leaves him so completely misinformed?

Unreal 1 remake! with the original music composer, and keeping the Nali and excorcizing the beef-head wrestler goons that pass for characters in modern Epic games.

^ Also this. The original Unreal is still on of my favorite FPS games. The 8-ball was a killer weapon. The outdoor areas were incredible for their time. So much fun!

Yeah, I don't remember many other games that have made me go "Hooolyy shiiiiit!" like Unreal did when you exited the crashed spacecraft.

It was one of those games where you'd go around just staring at the levels and lighting and enjoy the ambience. Pretty incredible for its time.

L.

Yeah... before I saw Unreal I saw Turok...and that REALLY made my mind assplode. I could not believe what I was seeing. But when I saw Unreal... I was satisfied that the PC had beaten the N64 again. For me... Unreal was the Turok beater...and the Quake II beater...and much more more. It was so much more trippy and sexy than anything else that it made Turok look quaint. It caused my visual cortex to just melt down. You needed LSD to do better than Unreal.

P.S. The mysticism and mystery of the world, and the Nali were a big part of what made it good, along with the crisp and contemplative tone of the world and the music.All later Unreal games shed this in favour of douchebag mongoloids on steroids. Unreal II was a false sequel that had little to do with the original and was of a totally different tone and spirit.

Unreal Tournament was nice, but beginning to lose Unreal's signature style. It also failed to develop or use the story about a blood-sport in a dystopian world. Stories are hard to do in tournament games, sure, but they could have tried to a bit, to at least base it on some back-story and have a bit of plot, maybe a cinematic or two.

After that it all went to hell. Unreal Tournament 3 tried to include story a bit...but it did it in the most stupid, hacked-on way possible. It was anything but seamless or natural feeling. And the story itself was a retarded self parody. It was impossible to care for the story.

The dumbest thing about Unreal Tournament 3's story was that it tried to retro-fit a story about war and revenge onto a blood-sport tournament game. Using the same maps. That was SUCH a stupid decision that I cannot imagine Epic was doing anything but snickering in contempt at its customers.

I mean... they had to come up with the most contrived and stupidest justifications for this "war" story to be occurring in deathmatch maps or the mission objectives strangely resembling the rules of capture the flag.

Did someone take stupid pills and forget that a story about a blood-sport tournament in a dark industrial future might fit 100% naturally onto the game? A story about a character, their back-story... their inclusion and progression through the tournament, and possibly their final victory or escape would have been a 100% shoe in.

I mean... it's not like they didn't have enough movies to copy? The Running Man, Gladiator and God knows how many others.

Otherwise you have got all this IP that is not contributing to the economy.

... so? If it's not contributing to anything, then it's not "uncontributing" either. It's not a drag on the economy; the IP for all practical purposes does not exist.

You could say that there's money to be made there, but then, there's money to be made in non-infringing ideas too. The problem is with people who would rather pay to fund a remake of a 15-year-old game without knowing if it'll be any good, than would pay money for a good game that isn't a remake.

That's a far bigger drag on the economy than not being able to bring certain properties to market.

The developers had already been working on the game beforehand so they only needed $150,000 to finnish their game. It also helped that they could offer a playable demo and a couple of videos showing the gameplay.

Otherwise you have got all this IP that is not contributing to the economy.

... so? If it's not contributing to anything, then it's not "uncontributing" either. It's not a drag on the economy; the IP for all practical purposes does not exist.

You could say that there's money to be made there, but then, there's money to be made in non-infringing ideas too. The problem is with people who would rather pay to fund a remake of a 15-year-old game without knowing if it'll be any good, than would pay money for a good game that isn't a remake.

That's a far bigger drag on the economy than not being able to bring certain properties to market.

Why is that a problem, or even a drag on the economy, especially in this case where people are ALREADY putting their money up on the game.

A use it or lose it copyright on video game IP (with possibilities for extensions, for games with significant current development ((for some definition of significant, to avoid DNF fiascos))) would be fantastic. You could even do something along the lines of a "soft" copyright expiration. While soft expired, anyone can use your IP, but they have to pay you a certain (5%?) percentage of their profits. If you start developing your IP again, your copyright goes back into effect, though any existing projects (in development or complete) would still fall under the soft expiration terms. At the expiration of the normal copyright terms, you would go into hard expiration.

Really looking forward to Planetary Annihilation, cut my teeth in the RTS genre on Total Annihilation and loved every minute of it. Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance were excellent successors to this and and part of the team from both is on Planetary Annihilation. I think they're going to knock it out of the park!

Would love to see Zork: Nemesis get the same treatment; I've been trying for ages to try and find anyone that can get me through to speak about either acquiring the rights (and source code etc.) to it, or some kind of agreement to just go ahead and port it to mobile devices (at the time the low resolution of the game wouldn't have mattered, but Apple just had to go and add retina displays…).

The guys behind the Pro Pinball series just started a Kickstarter campaign to remaster the original tables and create a new one. These are still the best pinball sims ever made despite dating back to the mid-90's. They have a pretty lofty goal and as much as I'd like to see it succeed, I must admit I'm skeptical that they will. $400k is quite a sum. I'm backing it nonetheless.Pro Pinball®: Revived & Remastered

I had to resist self servingly trying to talk Kyle into covering this, since I'd love to see it happen. The goal seems a little too high to hit easily.

What Kickstarter has done is bring back adventure games... From Double Fine, Tex Murphy, SpaceVenture (Space Quest guys), Leisure Suit Larry, Jane Jenson, Quest for Infamy to new really interesting games like Jack Houston and the Necronauts. 2013 will be a great year for adventure games I think.

The guys behind the Pro Pinball series just started a Kickstarter campaign to remaster the original tables and create a new one. These are still the best pinball sims ever made despite dating back to the mid-90's. They have a pretty lofty goal and as much as I'd like to see it succeed, I must admit I'm skeptical that they will. $400k is quite a sum. I'm backing it nonetheless.Pro Pinball®: Revived & Remastered

I had to resist self servingly trying to talk Kyle into covering this, since I'd love to see it happen. The goal seems a little too high to hit easily.

Ah come on... stop resisting. They need all the free publicity they can get. You know it'd practically be a crime to not see Timeshock! updated.

Dear anybody, especially current or former Bungie Software/Studios or 343 Studios folks or developers who would be willing to contact them to make sure there's no issue with the rights:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make a modern engine remake of the Marathon series. Do not change the story. Do not change the level design beyond accounting for modern engine and gameplay features (like jumping and crouching! ), and make sure any changes that you do make fit with the atmosphere of the original. You don't even have to add in voice acting; interacting with the AIs via text terminals would be fine. Do this, and I will throw money at you.

I'd ask the same for X-Wing and Tie Fighter games, but for some reason I think getting permission for that would be harder than from the Bungie folks. Maybe I am naive, but I can imagine Bungie maybe gladly giving permission for such a project.

A brand or franchise is a very valuable thing, I understand greatly the concern from companies if these projects get funded for spinoffs of their IP. Even if a company isn't going to use the IP, a poor quality remake damages the brand as a whole, and could hurt future plans. I'm ok if it's the IP owner doing this, but in general I'm not a huge fan of kickstarter for games. I prefer physical product entrepreneurship.